Darse

October - December 2026
de Sousa Gallery

Text: Silvio Lang
Guest artist: Martín Vatenberg
Production: Maria M. Mercante
Lighting design: David Seldes


In spanish, Darse can mean many things. To go all out. To give it your all. To show yourself off. To kiss each other. To turn around. To give each other love. To realize. To support each other. Mutual support. To give each other a hand. To encourage each other. To take shape. To give each other a hug… A popular turn of phrases that disrupts the fantasies of self-sufficiency and superiority held by the “good gay man”—adapted and entrenched in the privileges of whiteness. “Darse” evokes bodily gestures that aspire to a transcendence of the self: they are directed toward something other than individual identity. Gestures that are unproductive expenditures: incalculable in the debits and credits of the economy of performance and profit of the “brand self.” Gestures of risk, often reciprocal, though not symmetrical. Gestures of companionship that take root in the garden of another heart. Mutual touches, transformations of the flesh. Here, materialities give of themselves to one another, wrapping themselves around each other, invaginating, participating in one another. A whole material sociability of mingling, entanglement, and participation. In Alexis Minkiewicz’s “Darse,” the images gain value not only for what they reveal, but rather for how we can—or are—participating in them. “Darse” invites us, through shared physical sensations, to a promiscuous, tactile, raw, and tender fullness all at once. If, in his exhibition "Workplace Erotical" (2022), Minkiewicz homosexualized the physical strength of the working class, here he subverts (disorganizes) the hypersexualization of bodies and their sexual capital, from a radical intimacy with the materialities that power his “image factory”.

Extract from the text by Silvio Lang

Download the exhibition poster with the full text by Silvio Lang here
Download guest artist Martín Vatenberg's featured text here